After giving it some thought, you'll probably agree that the most important thing in life is the feeling of love inside and around you. If you feel the flow of love in your life, you have a springboard to miracles under your feet with every step. If you don't feel the flow of love, you could be a billionaire and feel like a pauper. Without love, you could be a movie star and not be able to look at your face in the mirror.

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We know this firsthand because several thousand couples have come through our office doors over the past 20 years. All of them were seeking to restore the flow of love between them. All of them had problems you'd recognize. They are the same problems we've faced in our own marriage. They are the exact problems that you and everyone else will face in a committed relationship.

In 9 out of 10 long-term relationships, vital energy slowly drains away because of problems in five specific areas. Even if the couple's surface conflict concerns sex or money, the real source of the problem is usually rooted in at least one of these five issues:

The First Insight

Every relationship conflict is rooted in a hidden commitment problem, even if the partners have been nominally committed for decades. If this commitment issue is addressed correctly, it becomes a catalyst for a profound breakthrough in harmony and creative energy.

Although most of the research on this commitment principle was carried out in marital relationships, we also confirmed it in the business world through our consulting work in approximately 80 companies. As we convey in lectures, this principle applies in the boardroom as well as in the bedroom. By analyzing hundreds of conflicts, we discovered that the problem often began with an unmade commitment. In other words, someone (or sometimes all parties) did not fully commit to a significant activity in the partnership. We worked out a simple way to find where the commitment problem was located and a technique for rapidly moving through the impasse. [pagebreak]

The Second Insight

Relationships flourish in an atmosphere of emotional transparency, especially when both people speak clearly about their deeper emotions such as fear, sadness, and longing. In the Lasting Love program, partners learn how to speak difficult truths in friendly ways. For example, if you speak bluntly to your partner—as in, "I'm gonna get you for flirting with Chris at the party"—you will invariably experience conflict. However, if you use our friendly technique of microscopic truth—as in, "When I saw you talking to Chris I got scared"—you will get a much friendlier response. The first communication contains a threat, "I'm gonna get you" and an arguable perception, "flirting with Chris." Even if you could get everybody at the party to agree that your partner was flirting with Chris, the statement would still trigger conflict.

The second communication contains a personal perception, "When I saw you" and an unarguable feeling-statement, "I got scared." Reliably, this move stops conflict and opens a space for resolution. In fact, our research indicates that once either partner speaks a sentence like this, a resolution usually occurs within 10 minutes. Interestingly, a gender difference emerged from our research: Breakthroughs often occur when men speak plainly about fear, sadness, and longing and when women speak plainly about anger. We tailored different communication strategies to the differing communication styles of men and women.

The Third Insight

Relationships thrive only when partners share responsibility for issues and duties. On a daily basis, vitality grows when each person takes full responsibility for any issue that arises. Vitality surges when both partners stop blaming and start claiming ownership of problems.[pagebreak]By contrast, most people try to apportion responsibility by asking the wrong question: Whose problem is it? This question always leads to blame, conflict, and power struggles. For example, a conflict about money may recycle for years, but it will get resolved only when each person claims full responsibility for the problem. When one person in a relationship habitually takes more than 100 percent responsibility for issues that arise, the other partner gets away with taking less than 100 percent responsibility. It is essential to correct this pattern so that balance can be attained in the relationship. People squander massive amounts of creative energy in relationships when partners point the finger of blame at each other. With the Responsibility Principle, partners meet on the equal ground of full ownership, thus eliminating the wasted energy of blame and power struggles.

The Fourth Insight

In nearly every long-term relationship, one partner consistently puts more energy into the relationship than the other partner. Over time, this imbalance causes the initiator to feel tired and unappreciated. The solution is not to focus on getting the other partner to change and put forth more energy, but for the initiator to make a commitment to his or her own creativity. In practical terms, the initiator must do something purely for self-expression (not for others) at least 1 hour per week. Our research has found that it takes only 1 hour a week of creative self-expression (e.g., journaling, learning an instrument, dancing, going on nature walks, meditating) to produce more vital energy in the individualand thus in the relationship. Of course, more than 1 hour is preferable, and surprisingly, the other partner begins to shift in positive directions as the initiator devotes more time and energy to individual creative expression. [pagebreak]

The Fifth Insight

Relationship vitality starts to wane in an "appreciation gap," and vitality continues to drain away as this gap widens. We can help pinpoint a specific place and time where the break first occurred in the ongoing flow of appreciation. Specific techniques can then restore the flow of appreciation, and this flow liberates creative energy in the partnership.

Partners speak appreciatively to each other in the early stages of a relationship, and although the appreciations may vary from the insightful to the trite, at least they are frequent. For example, statements such as "I like the way you look tonight" and "You make me feel like the luckiest person in the world" are more likely to be spoken in the first year than in the tenth. As time passes, couples speak fewer appreciations, instead devoting more and more time to solving problems. Problem solving is often directed outwardly toward children, maintenance of house and property, and other items that need constant attention. Usually, partners direct problem solving toward themselves only when conflict occurs. One of our clients told us, "I knew my marriage was over the day I got off an airplane, expecting a welcoming hug and kiss, and instead was greeted with, 'The upstairs toilet broke again.' " Fortunately, this couple was able to achieve Lasting Love again by balancing their problem solving with more spoken appreciations.

Time for a New Paradigm

In long-term relationships, most of us proceed slowly through a period of learning-love before we reap the harvest of genuine love. In learning-love, the unconscious goal is to get something in return for your love.You want to get approval, for example, or get confirmation that you are loveable. Genuine love is not about getting, nor is it about completing yourself in any way. Genuine love is between two people who know they are already complete. Genuine love is based on a new paradigm in which both partners are committed to the celebration of each other and their loved ones.

If partners in a relationship are willing to practice the simple Lasting Love techniques, they will get an immediate payoff in the form of a quantum shift in the level of harmony and creative energy, both in themselves and in the relationship. The heart and soul of the new paradigm is the celebration of essence. Essence is the word we use for the unconditioned, authentic self, the person we truly are beneath all the learned survival responses of early life. [pagebreak]The higher purpose of love relationships is to bring essence to light, revealing the creative self beneath all the personas everyone uses to survive and get recognition. In order for relationships to flourish, the essence of each person must be recognized and brought forth. If we are not willing to reveal who we truly are—or if we are not willing for our partners to reveal their true selves to us--conflicts will always follow in the aftermath of this decision to stonewall essence. The new paradigm comes with a comprehensive set of communication tools. Lasting Love is a program that employs these tools that anyone can use to transform relationships at home and at work. Useful with both adults and children, these new activities produce magical results in relationships, even if only one person applies them. When both people in a relationship understand the principles and practice the activities, however, they achieve a substantial enhancement of closeness and creative energy.

A New World Is Possible

We want to live in a world where all of us can feel the warm embrace of genuine intimacy instead of settling for the numbing couch comforts of compromise. We want to live in a world where each of us also gets the chance to contact and express our full creative potential.

We bet you want to live in that kind of world, too. From working on ourselves and with our clients, we know that this new world is possible. We also know that it is earned, not inherited or given. It is created by ordinary people with the will and courage to make extraordinary commitments. It is done one step at a time, with persistence and a good map.Lasting Love is that map. It was created "the hard way," by many trials and many errors. We tell our students: If we know anything at all about relationships, it's because we've made every mistake ourselves at least once and worked with it in others at least a dozen times. For us, the road was not always easy, but the rewards are beyond anything we ever imagined. If our map can save people from taking unnecessary detours and hitting speed bumps at a jarring pace, we will feel doubly rewarded. If it assists you in feeling the incredible vitality we've reveled in over the past 2-plus decades, we will feel that our life purpose has been fulfilled.